Because our Administration hates all regulations that actually help good Americans, our Securities and Exchange Commission (or SEC) wants to gut its whistleblower protection program. You can understand why governments hate whistleblowers -- because they expose the wrongdoing of politicians and political appointees! -- but the sheer hatred of the last two Administrations is still a bit surprising. Our SEC's proposed rules would automatically disqualify any whistleblowers who take their concerns directly to SEC Commissioners, would disqualify whistleblowers merely because they filled out paperwork wrong, and would put an arbitrary cap on whistleblower rewards; I'm no great defender of filling out paperwork incorrectly, for example, but the SEC's proposal would be like taking a sledgehammer to an ant. Why, it's almost like they're coming up with ways to protect their cronies from scrutiny! The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell our SEC to abandon its plans to make whistleblowing on financial firms a lot harder.
Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell Missouri's Governor to grant clemency to Russell "Rusty" Bucklew, because lethal injection would be, in his case, cruel and unusual. Mr. Bucklew suffers from a rare disease that grows tumors full of blood in his head and neck, and if he gets lethal injection, chances are those tumors would rupture and cause Mr. Bucklew to choke to death on his own blood. If you're reading that and saying so what? He's gonna die anyway, then you're doing civilization wrong -- we're supposed to be leaving as good example for future generations to follow, not wallowing in considerations of expediency until we become corrupt and cynical. And if you're familiar with the crime for which Mr. Bucklew got convicted, you might well be tempted to ask he sure didn't treat his victims with very much mercy, so why should we? Answer: the whole point of civilization is to lift ourselves above the murderer's level, not bring ourselves down to it. Maybe setting a good example will come back into vogue one day, but only if we lead.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 2155, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, then Color of Change still helps you do that. S. 2155 would make it a lot less attractive for big private equity corporations to do the thing they've done with impunity the last decade -- buy up large retail corporations, run them into the ground, and suck their wealth out in bonuses and fees on their way out the door. To think they have the gall to say we shouldn't "punish success," and that our richest Americans are merely the ones who have worked the hardest! How does running corporations into the ground and extracting their wealth benefit our civilization? Hell, how does it even qualify as "work"? And these predators have wiped a million jobs from our economy over the last decade; funny how folks who squeal about an increased minimum wage "killing jobs" have nothing to say about that. A lot of these folks are just nihilists, of course, but civilized people don't admire wanton destruction, let alone predators getting rich off it.
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